It's funny to think how the smartphones we have in our pockets today are ridiculously more powerful than what the Apollo 11 space shuttle crew had for it's trip to the moon. Think about that for a moment, it's pretty amazing seeing they made it there with something not much more powerful than your average calculator. But with just about everything, there's limitations. The end user is held back by processing speed, battery life, and actual storage on the device itself. So now we're starting to see an emergence of what many are calling "third platform" technology which is basically cloud computing.

What's cloud computing? To the uninitiated it's somewhat of a scary word because everyone is talking about it, but many haven't the slightest idea what it means nor what it does. It's an extension and a partnership on how your devices can be utilized better. The extension often times could be something as simple as storage that you can access with your internet connection via your phone or tablet. Google drive and drop box are perfect examples of this. When people run out of room on their phones/tablets, they'll just take what they have saved and move it to the cloud freeing up all that space. The partnership aspect is letting another machine on the internet (that's what cloud means, simply servers on the internet) do all of the hard number crunching for you and stream that data with the correct resolutions and visual quality back to your device of choice. Ever stream a movie, game (Playstation Now) or music from the internet? Congratulations, you're a cloud user.

One of the most powerful aspects of cloud use however is virtualization. You can see an example of the basic architecture in the image above. Whether you're just utilizing the hosted hypervisor aspect or actually have bare metal integration, this is what's fueling much of the cloud we know today, whether mobile or otherwise. Running applications like Xen Desktop for your employees in your offices that is practically indistinguishable from running a basic windows setup can save YOU a lot of money, time, and effort . Instead of purchasing powerful PC desktops to run windows, you can purchase inexpensive thin clients for your entire enterprise and your employees can login to their desktops from anywhere with an internet connection and work remotely. Their saved data and critical applications will be readily available at all times either in the office or from a cafe in Paris. I’ve worked for cloud companies in the past and this was our exact setup!

This is such a big subject it can hardly be summed up in three paragraphs. Are you curious what this new paridigm shift can do for you and your company? Give us a call, the options available might really surprise you.

The mobile cloud